60
“Thanks for letting me speak,” said Vivian, guest-starring at one of Father Jane’s services. She had been acting strangely since they’d come back from the boat, and stranger still in the past few days. It was their one hundred and eighty-seventh day at sea. She’d become withdrawn and quiet and — strangest of all — had stopped dating. In all the years she’d known Vivian, Jemma had only seen her do that three times, and never for more than a week — when she had mono in college, after the world ended, and after Ishmael broke up with her. Now it had been two weeks. Jemma thought at first that Vivian had merely exhausted the supply of men in the hospital — six weeks earlier they’d had a conversation in which they’d debated the merits and perils of re-dating a person — but the shallowest poll of the population revealed that there were men available who’d hardly even talked to Vivian, let alone dated her. Then Jemma thought she was considering a change of orientation — there’d been clues, after alclass="underline" a new, unattractive hairdo; the appearance in her wardrobe of two plaid shirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder; a new taste for heavy macramé jewelry that made her look like she was wearing plant holders around her neck. Arrested on the brink of lesbianism, she was considering the abyss, or else carefully scoping among the slim hospital pickings for prospects — all the obvious lesbians were already taken, even all the obviously incipient lesbians seemed to have found one another — and wondering if by the sheer enthusiasm of her new passion she might turn someone.
But it was just Jemma’s imagination that invested the looks of scorn Vivian habitually directed at Dr. Sundae with touches of longing, and when she finally asked her what was going on, she got an answer that only increased her confusion and her concern. “I don’t need it anymore,” Vivian said during Jemma’s twenty-seven-week checkup. Vivian was dipping Jemma’s urine, her back turned to her when she spoke. They were in the last exam room left in the ER.
“What does that mean?” Jemma asked, wondering suddenly if the angel was ministering to Vivian in ways that were nearly unimaginable, and a machine started to take shape in Jemma’s mind, a thing with multiple mechanical tongues and intricate penis wheels and long textured fingers.
“Just what it sounds like. I don’t need it.”
“Are you serious?”
“Look out the window, Jemma. Things have changed. Doesn’t it follow that we might change, too?”
“Did you have another bad experience?”
“Not in the way you think.”
“I’m thinking of you finally feeling like somebody was good for more than a day and then you get squashed. No?”
“It’s not that. I just don’t need it. I figured it out. Not the thing, but part of the thing. I can’t explain it yet.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to the boat.”
“Thank God,” Vivian said. “Thank God I went to the boat. Otherwise I’d still be screwed. I’d still be wasting my time, and our time.”
“But the list is your baby. Are you giving up?”
“Of course not. But you can go on and on with a list and never… I can’t explain it yet. One plus protein.”
“I don’t remember how to manage preeclampsia. I’m worried about you.”
“It’s just one plus, probably a contaminant. Go pee again.” That was no problem — Jemma could pee all the time. She was more careful this time, proctored by a fantasy of sickness in which she spent the last months of her pregnancy on a magnesium-sulfate drip, though she should be able to fix preeclampsia and eclampsia or even super-eclampsia and eclampsia suprema, should those diseases come to exist, as easily as she could fix anything or anyone except the boy from the boat.
“But what do you mean, you don’t need it?” Jemma asked again as she came back into the exam room. Vivian was gone. That was another strange thing Vivian was doing lately, suddenly disappearing, out of visits more and less official than this one had been, from lunch on the roof when Jemma went to fetch a ball kicked out of a nearby soccer game, or out of a Council meeting when they were briefly adjourned for dinner. When she caught up with her Vivian always said the same thing, “I needed to be alone for a minute.” Jemma dipped her own urine. This time it was protein-free.
“Thanks for letting me speak,” Vivian said again, up on a balcony in the lobby atrium. Jemma had an excellent view of her, one floor up and directly across from her, standing with her hands folded in a freshly tended flower-box full of pansies. “The angel makes me speak like she’s made everybody else, but I’m glad that she’s done it. I used to think, look at those morons up there, babbling away about their personal obsessions, trying to apply them to everybody else in a way that will make them seem less like a freak. So now I’m the moron. Listen to me.
“I’ve been thinking about the boat. I know you have, too. What happened to them? We’ve assumed that it wasn’t very pleasant, but who knows. Maybe they just left the boy behind when they got a better party boat, one with louder music and taller cakes and more fabulous whores and gigolos. You’re too little, they said to him. You can’t come. We’ve all heard that before, and we all remember, don’t we, how bitter and angry it made us feel. Maybe he got so angry and disappointed that he fell over in a coma.
“But what if they’re all dead? Everybody’s dead, you might say. Big deal. Everybody’s dead but us, because they were not selected like us, because they were not supposed to be part of the new world. We are not here by accident, are we?
“But what if I said to you, we are dead, too? What if I told you that I have been occupied with a single thought ever since I returned to this hospital? It started when I saw the hospital floating in the middle of the fucking ocean, and I can hardly describe how strange it was, to see it like that — it was stranger to see it than to live it — and then I felt it in my little missus, a terrible unease. It spread from there and by the time it got to my head I knew what it was, and now I declare it to you. A single very distinct thought, that we are more dead even than those disappeared people on the boat. There’s a different kind of death than the one we usually think about. We can imagine what they must have gone through on the boat, all the expiring groans, the convulsions and the agonies. Maybe there were devouring little worms, or bigger worms that leaped from the sea to burrow up their asses and eat them up from the inside. Those are the ones that have always scared me. It’s why I never wanted to be buried at sea, which reminds me, as long as we’re talking about this sort of thing, that if you all outlive me, that I want to be cremated. Let me make that clear right now. I’ll hold you responsible if my wishes are not carried out.” She pointed randomly into the crowd, and her finger fell on Pickie Beecher, standing next to Rob one level down to Jemma’s left. He only shrugged.